February 2010

February 16, 2010

It's Shrove Tuesday, and while New Orleans may have Mardi Gras, we here in Pennsylvania Dutch Country have Fasnacht Day.

What is a fasnacht, you ask? It is a kind of super-doughnut, made with potato flour, sugar, and lard. Don't scoff. They are terrific. They are only sold one day a year - today, the day before Ash Wednesday. Historically, they were the last gastronomic hurrah before Lent, a way to use up all the sugar and lard in the pantry before forty days of fasting began. As you might imagine, they are not health food. No one, as far as I am aware, has ever calculated the calories in a fasnacht. Really, it's better not to know.

What distinguishes fasnachts from ordinary doughnuts is their muchness. They are heavier (potato flour and lard will do that) and usually significantly bigger. They have a wonderfully crispy outside and a decadently soft inside. They come in many varieties - glazed, powdered, filled - but my favorite are ones that are simply dusted with granulated sugar. Heaven.

Fasnachts are serious business here in the Susquehanna Valley. Advertising begins weeks ahead of time, and bakeries and supermarkets open early to handle the rush. When I went to the grocery store to pick up ours today, there were extra tables outside, piled high with fasnachts of all complexion wafting their yeasty aroma through the chilly air, enticing any reluctant buyers (not that there are many of those). And if you think you'll just pick up your dozen on the way home from work, think again: by suppertime, there is not a fasnacht left to be had for love nor money in York County.

So, while the good people of rural Pennsylvania are not ones for gaudy beads, jazz music, and excess alcohol, they do have their moments of over-indulgence. Ah, fasnachts! How we love you!

February 15, 2010

First, let
me introduce myself. My entire family,
on both sides, originated from Harlan, Kentucky, a coal town in the southeastern part of the Bluegrass State, a place of great importance to
labor historians and country singers. My
ancestry consists mostly of alcoholics and pill addicts, xenophobes,
agoraphobes, preachers, toothless Felliniesque pinheads, veterans of foreign
wars with unidentifiable diseases, attempted murderers, moonshiners and
bootleggers, racists, golfers, magicians, disability royalty, suicides,
freemasons, and a legion of mourners.
Before I arrived on the scene, my mother and father and my two sisters
moved north to Dayton, Ohio, birthplace of African-American poet
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, actor Rob Lowe, and sibling aviators Orville and Wilbur
Wright. If my father had stayed in
Harlan, there is little doubt the man would have been a miner instead of a
construction worker, which means I, too, might have gone underground to make a
living (if there were any coal left in those mangled hills). I suppose this constitutes what William
Wordsworth, son of a noble lord’s personal attorney and lifelong resident of
the Lake District in northwest England, referred to in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” as a “low and rustic
life” where the “essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which
they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer
and more emphatic language.” If so, I
got lucky. I am the first person in my
immediate family to graduate from high school.

To me, Dayton always epitomized a
dying city. And, according to the one
friend I know who still lives there, these hard economic times have caused this
statement to ring true. I spent my early
twenties trying to get out of Ohio. On the third try, I never went back. I have not lived in Dayton for more than twenty years. I have nothing against Ohio
or Dayton in
particular, but there was simply nothing to do in that town except walk around
with a plastic cup waiting for someone to pour beer into it. If you wanted to check out any “professional”
art and entertainment, you had to drive sixty miles south to Cincinnati.
Though quite conservative politically, Cincinnati had the clubs,
museums, the Reds and the Bengals, independent cinema, and the University had
enough money to bring in some major poets.

Now, this
happened twenty-five years ago, so the statute of limitations on bizarre decisions has run out. I purchased a sheet of forty
doses of lysergic acid diethylamide from
an acquaintance for the rock-bottom price of two dollars per tab. Like many troubled yet intellectually curious
youth, I wanted to experiment with a drug akin to the one I’d read about in
Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception—not
Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
a book I did not read and subsequently despise until I was in my thirties. Ingesting LSD seems innocent enough when
you’re young, but now I see it as a symptom of reality not especially working
out for me. I’ve changed all that. Things are better now. Okay, no more disclaimers, push on, Williams.

One clear
October night, two friends and I decided to travel to Cincinnati and see Robert Creeley read. During the mid-1980s, Creeley was my favorite
poet. I loved his spare but filling
lyrics—and he seemed so cool in Elsa
Dorfman’sphotograph that appeared on the cover of The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley in 1982. Sporting a Van Dyke beard and long
slicked-back hair, he’s staring fearlessly into the camera with his one eye,
his right eye, and the eyelid of his missing left eye is flattened and exposed. No patch or glass eye in this picture.

Ed note: For the next several weeks, composer and film aficionado Lewis Saul has agreed to supply us with in-depth commentary about the films of Akira Kurosawa, now showing in an extended festival at the Film Forum. Even if you're unable to stop by the Forum, we think Lew's insights will deepen your appreciation of these important movies.

The film is based on the autobiography of Vladimir Arseniev (a brilliant Yuri Solomin), a Russian soldier in charge of several surveying expeditions in the Ussuri region of Siberia in the early 1900's. He meets Dersu (Maksim Munzuk, you will never forget him!), a Goldi (Mongolian). Not much happens, other than what normally happens in Siberia on any given day in any given season by any given surveying crew at the start of the 20th century! If Kurosawa were simply intent on allowing us the pleasure of this travelogue ... dayenu, as my people say -- it would have been enough! But this incredible human interest story is so very pertinent today, 35 years later, as human beings continue to act as they did 100 years ago, which is when this story begins -- the year Kurosawa was born: 1910.

"Nu?" -- it always appears with a question mark -- is best defined
linguistically rather than lexiographically. But let's leave that to
others! The best way to know "nu?" is by watching "nu?" in action. One
example is below. For the enlightenment of all, it would be great if
others could share comments on their experiences with this delightful
word --->>>

This was to be a genial post about snow and the city during Valentine
days.

Then death intervened.

On Friday, at a faculty meeting, Amy Bishop murdered three of her
colleagues in the Biology Department of the University of Alabama/Huntsville and badly wounded three others.

I learned about this homicidal violence the way one does these days:
first a crawl at the bottom of a newscast, which noted her Harvard
training as a neuroscientist. Apparently, the fact that a Ph.D. from a
prestigious university would fatally ransack a human body with bullets can still
shock us. Then TV elevated the murders to "Breaking News" and a "Developing Story" with law
enforcement officers giving their sober press conferences.

Then The New York Times began to run its fact-filled stories.

Dr. Bishop left her pistol in a second-floor bathroom.Dr. Bishop is a
wife, married to another scientist, James Anderson. Dr. Bishop is a
mother, with four children. Dr. Bishop and her husband have been
responsible for some promising biotechnology inventions. Dr.
Bishop,perhaps significantly, had been denied tenure and was appealing
the decision. Dr. Bishop was outspoken about university
policies. Dr. Bishop was considered a lousy teacher. The
Times found colleagues who said she was "a little quirky
but no more so than most scientists." Dr. Bishop had fatally shot
her brother in 1986 in Massachusetts but never charged with a
crime.

I have stared at the pictures of Dr. Bishop after her arrest: a woman in
a pink sweater, a heavy face, dark hair cut in a page boy with bangs,
looking fierce and distraught in one photo, blank in another. The
pictures tell me nothing except that her appearance would be familiar on
a campus. Murders, of course, are far less familiar on an American campus
than frumpiness. Both sweetly and despairingly, we want campuses to be
islands of civility and learning in a sea of disputations, blows, and
ignorance.

However, I am rarely surprised by violence on a campus. The academic
ideal of being an island of civility permits quirkiness to flourish---among all the disciplines. Unfortunately, more
than quirkiness abounds. Every day I see wonderful, wonderful people at
work, but I have also noted a rudeness that self-righteousness
justifies; indifference to the well-being of others; and the moral
equivalent of manslaughter through reviews, tenure and promotion letters,
memoranda, and gossip.

Within departments and dormitories, little villages within the large city
of a big university, people know each other well, unless they dwell with
an oblivion to others that borders on and flows into neurosis. People
know who is on edge, who is cruel, who is merely a curmudgeon. People
know about the stresses of the tenure process, and who seems to be
handling it well or not. The "shock" that gets expressed on
campuses where violence occurs should not be over the fact of murder
itself. It should be over our inability to tell who will merely
"speak violence" and who will bring a weapon to a faculty
meeting. I believe that our tolerance does permit vicious feelings to
spill out with comparatively little harm. Words are less harmless
than sticks and stones. So folklore tells us. But our tolerance, like our
devotion to academic criticism and research, does atrophy our capacity to
tell who might actually murder or critically wound us.

When I was making notes about snow and the city, I observed feet. Who was
wearing sneakers, who boots? Whose pants were protected from slush, whose were wet and dragging in
puddles of ice and water? The task, without lapsing into paranoia, is to ask whose feet might be
carrying death towards us.

<<<You're gonna love me, like nobody's loved me,Come rain or come shineHappy together, unhappy togetherand won't it be fineDays may be cloudy or sunnyWe're in or we're out of the moneyBut I'm with you alwaysI'm with you rain or shine>>>

February 14, 2010

This week we welcome Jerry Williams as our guest blogger. Williams has published two collections of poetry, Casino of the Sunand Admission, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has also edited an anthology--It's Not You, It's Me: The Poetry of Breakup--published by The Overlook Press. His poems, reviews, and creative nonfiction have appeared in such magazines as Tin House, American Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, and Pleiades. He lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at Marymount Manhattan College.

The poet Lucille Clifton died yesterday. There was not a single person in American letters more beloved - not just for her work, but for herself - her warmth, humor, and kindness. Even though she had been in failing health for a long time, the news of her death came as a shock. How could Lucille die? What will we do now?

I met Lucille almost twenty years ago in southern Maryland, at St. Mary's College where she taught for many years. I was lucky enough to be assigned to her for a brief tutorial, and I was scared to death. People at St. Mary's spoke of her as if she were a combination of their mothers and the goddess Athena. But she was friendly and kind, even perhaps a little shy, as I walked into the room, poems in trembling hand. She gave my poems an encouraging, thoughtful reading, and I left the tutorial as bedazzled by her as everyone else.

Soon, though the aegis of a women writers group of which she was a member and which I shortly was invited to join, we became friends. The group met in St. Mary's County, and I came down from northeast of Baltimore to attend. Lucille didn't drive, and sometimes I would pick her up from her Lexington Park apartment; sometimes I would fetch her from the home in Columbia, MD she shared with her daughters, those beautiful, "gaudy girls" of her poem. (The Columbia house was cozy and comfortable, like Lucille. Quirkily, in the living room there was a small-scale suit of armor, maybe three-and-a-half feet tall. "That's not a knight," Lucille would joke, "That's an evening.") On those drives, we would talk about all kinds of things, not just poetry - raising children, the latest literary gossip, what to have for dinner. The writers group was important to Lucille because she was able to relax there. She could hang out and laugh and gossip and share poems and laugh some more, not an Icon of American Literature but just one of the girls.

One night at the writers group, Lucille told us about a fox that had been hanging out on her front porch. Lucille wasn't what you'd call an animal person - she seemed to be a little of afraid of them - but she regarded animals with that innate respect that she gave the whole world. I said, being the gaga animal lover, something like, "Wow, that's an honor. She chose you to visit." Lucille laughed and said well, she'd sooner the honor went to someone else. But not long afterward, she came to the group to share what became the "fox poems" of her 1996 book, the terrible stories. She wrought the fox - powerful, scary, beautiful - into metaphor to help her write what are perhaps her most difficult and bravest poems. So typical of her - she had that kind of artistic courage.

She also had personal courage. She faced the deaths of her husband and two children, cancer, kidney failure, a transplant, with what Hemingway called "grace under fire." Even when her health really began to fail, she made her way to conferences and readings. She retired from teaching, but she never retired from poetry.

There are many other things I would like to write about Lucille, but today I am too sad and stunned. So I leave you with the title poem from the terrible stories and the fox she used to transform fear into metaphor, into art.

This poem by Harvey Shapiro appeared in Hanging Loose 81, in Spring, 2002.

DESK

After my death, my desk,

which is now so cluttered,

will be bare wood, simple and shining,

as I wanted it to be in my life,

as I wanted my life to be.

-- Harvey Shapiro

There’s a letter from William Carlos Williams, written from
Yaddo just after World War II, that mentions meeting the young Harvey Shapiro
there and says nice things about his work.That was 64 years ago.A few
weeks ago, in Key West, we had a
party to celebrate Harvey’s 86th
birthday.He likes a good party.

The voice in Harvey’s
many books has been consistent over the years; the diction has grown steadily
tighter, simpler, always elegant.By
contrast, there is the horde of poets at this stage of the game who have
produced great, baggy, long poems, often tiresome, sometimes unbearable, as the
Official-Summing-Up-Capstones-to-My-Illustrious Career.Perhaps that’s a requirement in some academic
contracts.

Although he has taught at Yale and Columbia,
Harvey has not had a career in the
classroom.Instead, he served as an
editor of The New York Times for 42 years, eight of them as editor-in-chief of
the Book Review.I like to think that
those decades of journalism had an influence on Harvey’s
poetry: Say what you’ve got to say and get out of the way.I know there are lots of other influences,
but I fancy this one.Hell, I started
out as a reporter myself.

February 12, 2010

It isn't horrible because I happen to like the song a lot. "Come to the Moon," is an obscure Gershwin tune and I thank Lloyd Schwartz for introducing it to me by recommending Broadway Show Stoppers (get it!). I'm not sure why the song is infiltrating my thoughts now (dreams of escape?) but in my experience, the only way to rid oneself of an earworm is to hear the song in its entirety. Unfortunately the "worm" activates itself when I'm away from my music collection. So I've done the obvious: searched the nooks and crannies of YouTube for a video, preferably of an award-winning college choir like this one giving it the full treatment. No such luck. Instead, I waded into the apparently very deep waters of the Japanese Vocaloid . The "singer" of Gershwin's tune is Megurine Luka (巡音ルカ, a twenty-six year old female who "sings" in both English and Japanese. What strikes me as bizarre here is that the vocaloids are opting to cover these old standards. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? You tell me.

Ed note: For the next several weeks, composer and film aficionado Lewis Saul has agreed to supply us with in-depth commentary about the films of Akira Kurosawa, now showing in an extended festival at the Film Forum. Even if you're unable to stop by the Forum, we think Lew's insights will deepen your appreciation of these important movies.

The main difference between the two films is this: Yojimbo was set in a dusty town in the middle of nowhere where lawlessness ruled, whereas this film is set in a "castle town" -- that is, a world of lords and ladies, superintendents and chamberlains, young samurai retainers and ... of course, our hero, Sanjuro! (There is a fun debate on the IMDb about whether this film is a sequel or a prequel! To me, it seems to take place during an earlier time period than the one shown in Yojimbo.) However,

" ... it doesn't really matter. One of the most important things about adventure stories with a hero who isn't tied down, is that he can be reinvented with each new episode. If, though, one is going to play this game of figuring out which story comes first, then in my opinion, the deepening of Sanjuro's character that we see in this film suggests that its story is subsequent to the one in Yojimbo" [SP].

To my way of thinking, Galbraith nails it: the theme of this film is quite simple -- nothing is what it seems [p. 324]. Mutsuta, the chamberlain (Yûnosuke Itô) is ugly -- but he's the good guy; the handsome Hanbei Muroto (Tatsuya Nakadai) is the villain. The confident boy samurai are incompetent while the scruffy Sanjuro is a master. Et cetera. The theme drives the plot and the three writers made the character much more active than originally written and created a scenario which is -- at times -- very very funny.

February 11, 2010

I have been fascinated by the myth of Icarus. As a child, I
lived in ancient Greece. The book of myths was my favorite and the world of
jealous gods and god-like humans was more real to me than the world outside of
my windows, full of bloody red flags (the red of the Soviet flag symbolized the
blood of the heroes of the Revolution) and the Soviet-trinity portraits of
Lenin-Marx-Engels with the occasional bushy eyebrows of Brezhnev looking at me
from the walls of the buildings. In some ways the two worlds blurred. The world
outside made much more sense through the perspective of the ancient Greek
myths, where it was quite common for a power-protective god to devour all his
children.

Icarus was one of my heroes (or antiheroes, depending on the
interpretation) – the winged boy who dared to fly too close to the sun.The wings were made by his father,
Daedelus, a skilled craftsman, who earlier in his life designed the famous
labyrinth in Crete that held the Minotaur. Deadalus was held prisoner in Crete
and the wings were his only way to escape.

Deadalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or
too close to the ocean, but what teenager listens to his father? Exhilarated by
freedom, by his own youth, by the feeling of flight, Icarus soared higher and
higher until the wax on his wings melted and he fell into the ocean. Oh,
gravity! Sometimes I think it is the law of gravity that truly defines our
existence.

What makes this myth so touching is Icarus’s impatience of
the heart, his wish to reach the unreachable, the intensity of the ecstatic
brevity of his flight and inevitability of his fall. If Icarus were to fly
safely – there would be no myth. His tragic death is beautiful. It also poses a
question – from Deadalus’s point of view – how can one distinguish success from
failure? Deadalus’ greatest invention, the wings which allowed a man to fly,
was his greatest failure as they caused the death of his son. Deadalus was
brilliant, his wings were perfect, but he was also a blind father who did not
truly understand his child. If he did, he would realize that the road to
freedom leads to its ultimate form – death, which Icarus, with the
uncompromising daring of youth, achieves. The desire for freedom, taken to its
extreme, receives its absolute form– a closed circle in which success means failure and freedom means
death.

The desire to go beyond the boundaries into the ecstatic
visionary realm of soaring flight is essentially human. In some ways this
desire to transcend the everyday-ness is whatit means to be human. That is why this myth has resonated
for centuries. Icarus knows the danger of flying too high, but the risk is
justified in his eyes. He needs to fly as high as he can, beyond what is
possible – it is his nature.

Next week, on February 18, 19 and 20, the National Symphony in Washington D.C., conducted by James Gaffiganwill perform American
premiere of my symphonic poem, titled “Requiem for Icarus”. The title was given to this work after it was
written. All my music is abstract, but by giving evocative titles I invite the
listener to feel free to imagine, to access his own memories, associations.
“Requiem for Icarus” is what came to my mind, listening to this work at that
time. Each time I hear the piece – it is different. What is important to me is
that it connects to you, the listener, in the most individual and direct way,
that this music disturbs you, moves you, soars with you, stays with you. You
don’t need to understand how or why – just allow the music to take you wherever
it takes you. It is permissible to daydream while listening or to remember your
own past. It is fine not to have any images at all, but simply experience the
sound. These program notes are a door to your imagination. The music is your
guide. But it is up to you to take the step and cross the threshold.

February 10, 2010

"Nu?" -- it always appears with a question mark -- is best defined linguistically rather than lexiographically. But let's leave that to others! The best way to know "nu?" is by watching "nu?" in action. One example is below. For the enlightenment of all, it would be great if others could share comments on their experiences with this delightful word --->>>

Painter Eric Fischl sends along this link to Soldier to Poet, an ongoing exchange between poet Carol Muske-Dukes and Lt. Colonel Ledford, a United States officer stationed in Afghanistan. Colonel Ledford's is one of the contributors to the Great American Renga, "Crossing State Lines" -- a "conversation" poem among 53 American poets and one poet-soldier -- soon to be published as part of the AMERICA: Now & Here national arts project. Read more about AMERICA: Now & Here, here.

"Lively and affectionate" Publisher's Weekly. Now in paperback.Click image to order your copy.

Register now for our 5th annual session Jan 27 - Feb 3. “What better place to read, write, and talk about the art and craft of writing than Todos Santos, where all the saints of the sea and sky watch over you?” - Christopher Merrill

Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours laterto the greatnessof Teddy Wilson"After You've Gone"on the pianoin the cornerof the bedroomas I enterin the dark